Girls' education is a climate solution: Malala Yousafzai joins climate protest

Agencies | Stockholm        

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

The fight against climate change is also a fight for the right to education of girls, millions of whom lose access to schools due to climate-related events, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai said yesterday.

Yousafzai was speaking outside the Swedish parliament where she joined environmental campaigners Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate at one of the Friday climate protests which have been held there every week since 2018 and sparked a global movement.

In 2012, the now 24-year-old survived being shot in the head by a Pakistani Taliban gunman after she was targeted for her campaign against the Taliban’s efforts to deny women education. She subsequently became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her education advocacy.

“Due to climate-related events, millions of girls lose their access to schools. Events like droughts and floods impact schools directly, displacements are caused due to some of these events,” Yousafzai said in an interview.

“Because of that, girls are impacted the most: they are the first ones to drop out of schools and the last ones to return.” During the demonstration, Yousafzai recounted a story of how her own education was interrupted by climate change as her school and many others in the locality were flooded.

Yousafzai, Nakate and Thunberg all stressed how women, especially those in developing countries, were disproportionately affected by the climate crisis and can be part of the solution if they are empowered by education.